Can I Get advice for my website idea

[tlcreations]

Hey everyone. I am new here.
I hoping someone can give me advice on a website I am getting ready to try and build. Mind you, surfing, emailing, and downloading are the extent of my computer knowledge.

I would like to start a website where people do the following:

Pay the site $x.xx and then they are free to post a picture on my site.(This is a one time cost for that one picture, any other picture they post would require them to pay again)
Also, they can post a little comment and a small profile page.
Others can come on the site and leave comments of the pictures (they do not need a membership to do this)
Others can come on the site and vote on the pictures ( no membership)
The only ones that will fill out any kind of a profile, will be the ones submitting pictures.
This is in no way a dating site.

I know I need a merchant account for them to pay me. But that's it.
It seems like everytime I google how to build a web site, there are pages upon pages of stuff I barley understand. I've also recieved quotes for someone to build my website. The problem with this is that they are toooo costly for a website that I'm not even sure will catch on.

O.K.
so I have my domain name, now how do I build a website that will do what I want it to do?

Does anyone have any answers for me? ANY advice is better than no advice.

Thanks so much in advance!

[maclinda]

Have you checked out freewebs? (www.freewebs.com)

You may or may not want to use that as your permanent site, but you can sign up and make a totally free website and start getting an idea of what's going on. Another cool thing about freewebs is you can charge for things using paypal, so no big expense for the merchant account.

I have one free site there, a few paid sites (paid gets rid of ads); my largest business site is on another host which I'm not completely fond of, so I'm not going to recommend them (they're just too high tech for most of us at that host). I have some unused domains parked at a cool place, where I can stick some google adsense ads and keep all of that money--that's not a terribly bad idea for your domain name while you're playing with the freewebs one.

[Brutha]

The problem with this is that they are toooo costly for a website that I'm not even sure will catch on.

What is your time worth? You are probably better of with rentacoder or a similer service if you value your time.

Pay the site $x.xx and then they are free to post a picture on my site.(This is a one time cost for that one picture, any other picture they post would require them to pay again)

I don't know what kind of service you have in mind, but I don't think that enough people will pay for that kind of service for it to go viral.
Getting a free (Adsense based) website to go viral is difficult enough.
Even hotornot has no droped their payed memberships and made everything free, because they think that free sells better.

If you think that your concept will work, drop the pay element and give let someone from rentacoder (or a similar site) programm it. It will cost you a few thousand dollar but safe you month of time learning to programm a site. In addition you probably will make errors when you programm the site yourself with result in the site being hacked.

[Chinese Dragon]

Do a quick google search on HTML if getting a professional is too costly for you. It's quite easy to learn compared to the rest of the internet technology. I'm not a professional web designer (I'm a programmer), but I've picked up enough to know to that be a good web designer you need an understanding of the following:

• HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
• Javascript
• PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor)

No offense, but I think you might want to rethink your site idea a bit. Posting pictures and commenting on them is already offered for free on many sites such as myspace, xanga, freewebs, etc. It will be hard to generate income unless you can beat them in at least one area.